Latest release: The Idler Wheel... is
perhaps Apple’s barest, most characteristic album yet. She allows her
voice to break many times throughout its course, letting her past
experiences and pains seep through the cracks, and the mood varies
wildly while engaging throughout.

Why you care: Apple’s steamy
contralto, when combined with her finger-breaking piano skills, is
enchanting at the least and debilitating at the most. She first exploded
into national consciousness with “Criminal”—a naughty, torchy number
that is doubly so considering she was only 19 years old upon its
release. Since then, she has released ingenious music on her own
timeline and according to her own rules: Apple went on hiatus following
both When the Pawn… (1999) and Extraordinary Machine
(2005), and her sprawling songs defy genre by mixing innumerable
influences at every turn. Apple exists slightly outside of explanation,
and it’s evident in the company she keeps: She’s friends with oddball
comedian Zach Galifianakis (see the 2005 video for “Not About Love”),
dated odder-ball magician David Blaine, and was cited as one of
oddest-ball rapper Kanye West’s biggest influences (he said Extraordinary Machine made him want to be the “hip-hop Fiona Apple”). “I just want to feel everything,” she warbles on The Idler Wheel..., and Apple may just have reached her goal in her music.